Space Opera Roleplaying Adventures

Category Archives: News

I’m still alive! Work has been progressing on Tangent Space and I’ve made several significant improvements to the game’s mechanics.

Skills

As mentioned before, specializations are gone and have been replaced with skills. I was also dissatisfied with how front-loaded most character building decisions were. Players don’t usually know what they want to do with a character until they’ve been playing them for a while. To that end, the merit system has also been replaced. Instead, skills are now mastered by using them during the game.

Characters can use any skill they have mastered the prerequisite for. Basic skills can be used and can stockpile experience regardless of prerequisites, but cannot be mastered without the prerequisite. This allows players to experiment with different skills and naturally gravitate towards the play style they most enjoy.

Basic skills require 5 experience points to master, and all other skills require 10. Spending downtime scenes training is the only way to build experience for passive skills. This makes passive choices far more meaningful as they are not as easily acquired as usable skills.

Dice Pools

The base action resolution mechanic now involves rolling a number of d12 and selecting one of them to calculate success or failure.

Skills you haven’t mastered only get to roll a single d12. Skills you have mastered get an additional d12 added to the pool. If the skill category is your specialty, you get one more d12 added to the pool. That means skills mastered in your specialty have a dice pool of 3d12 by default! This way, characters can have a level of confidence in the skills they know they are good at, but have a lot more uncertainty about skills they haven’t practiced.

Each strike against your Life or Mind lowers your dice pool by 1d12, simulating the rising difficulty of performing actions while wounded or mentally imposed. Spending a point of Luck allows you to temporarily add an additional d12 to your pool during an action roll. There are other temporary effects from skills and environmental conditions that can add or subtract from the dice pool as well.

Preview PDFs

Have a look at the PDF previews below for the current state of skills and the most recent character sheet. As usual, any images used are placeholders and do not represent the artwork that will be included in the completed product.

It’s been a while since my last post. I’ve been working on some big improvements to the game that have taken a lot of time to implement. Here is a brief overview of some of the things I’ve been up to:

Attributes have been removed from the game in favor of characters simply selecting a preferred skill category to get a bonus from.

Specializations have been removed from the game in favor of a point-buy skill system with prerequisites.

The social mechanics have been expanded into their own skill category.

An Affinity system has been added to encourage interaction between PCs and NPCs.

Time has been abstracted into “scenes” which allow for more flexibility in story pacing.

Vehicles and Starships no longer have their own skills, but rather install components that allow characters to use their skills through the vessel.

Piloting has been expanded into its own skill category.

Ranged skills and weapons no longer have a maximum range, but rather lose accuracy the further away they target.

Playable races now each have three subgroups which grant unique passive effects.

The Zauriim have been removed from playable races, to be added later alongside the Hegemony content.

This is hardly an exhaustive list, as there is still so much more to do. I’m currently running two testing campaigns to further hone the game into its final form. Keep an eye out for more information! I’ll be updating the rulebook draft with all of the changes soon.

In the hopes of getting more awesome feedback on the project, I’ve compiled the latest working draft of the game into a PDF. Chapters 1 through 3 are in a mostly finished state. Chapters 4 and 5 still need to be written and are not included.

As with everything I’ve shown so far, all artwork is only a placeholder and will not be part of the finished product.

RULE CHANGE:Armor Piercing damage now deals normal damage to Armor values. If the damage is completely absorbed by the Armor, the damage removes the target’s lowest available Endurance value. If the target has no Endurance values left, the target takes a strike against their Life. Barrier Piercing damage now ignores Barrier values altogether. These changes also apply to Vehicle and Starship tiers.

NOTE:The cost for adding modules to equipment is missing. Each module costs 25% of the equipment’s base cost.

This is just a quick update to let everyone know what I’ve been up to lately!

Progress on the first draft of the core rulebook is coming along nicely! The characters chapter is pretty much finished, and that was one of the biggest and most complicated sections of the book. I’ve got the basics of the mechanics listed in the introduction chapter and I’m gearing up to put together the vehicles and starships chapter.

I even managed to update the character sheet and the vehicle/starship sheet! Links to the PDF files provided below:

You might be wondering why I went radio silent for so long. I just finished the first real playtest of Tangent Space! It ran for about six weeks and finished this weekend. It felt great to see the mechanics working in real time and watching the players have fun breaking the system as players tend to do. Now I’m compiling all the feedback and making plans for the many revisions that need to take place. A lot of it is minor tweaks and clarifications. One of the biggest jobs will be a pass on character specializations and the associated resources. While I like most of how they worked, there are some big flaws in the system that need to be addressed. The next playtest will include exotic specializations along with vehicles and ships! Suffice to say, I’ll be very busy for the next few months. I’ll post snippets of what I’m working on here from time to time, so look forward to that! My goal is to have the revisions completed sometime in January, at which point another playtest will commence!

I was able to have a really good playtest of Tangent Space that highlighted a lot of things that need to be improved or outright redesigned. Little things are mostly math related, which only require a few tweaks. One of the biggest things I’m working on right now is replacing Skills with Specializations.

Each character will have three specializations selected from Military, Technical, Psionic, or Exotic categories. Each specialization can be leveled up from 1 to a maximum of 10. As they level, new abilities and traits for the character are unlocked. There will be no restrictions on how a player chooses to mix and match these specializations.

This change allows me to get a lot more creative with the cool and interesting things the characters are able to do, and allows players to come up with interesting combinations that suit their personal play style. This is a pretty big change to the way Tangent Space characters work, but I believe it will be well worth the time and effort.